Direct physical hacking attacks
Also "malicious microbots for direct physical hacking attacks".
Contents
Resilience against natural physical attack (viruses, bacteria, fungi, ...)
One awesome (or horrible depending on your perspective) property of products of gem-gum technology is that it pretty much does not weather or biodegrade, unless deliberately designed too e.g. by using water dissolvable gemstones.
There are no biological organisms that can degrade things like diamond and thee likely will never evolve such organisms even if exposed to large quantities of diamond over long periods of time. At least judging from what happened with quartz. Life was heavily exposed to quartz the entirety of over earth's history but there are still no fast "rock eaters" that directly feed on quartz's solid undissolved form.
Yes there are glass shell forming microorganisms, but these only take up silica that already has been dissolved
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiolaria
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatom
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_dioxide#Biology
Bamboo too has a surprising amount of silica in it's leaves (producing a lot of fly-ash when burned)
Eventual non-resillience against artificial physical hacking attacks
Long story short products of gem-gum technology will likely be and stay immune against biodegradability forever. But ... as humans are their own worst enemy we eventually will make microscale robots for the sole purpouse of physically infiltrating products of gem-gum technology and taking control over them.
Malicious Mobile nanoscale robotic devices with added capabilities of free space mobility. Most likely only with capabiliteis of microcomponent maintenance microbots. That is no capability of Piezochemical mechanosynthesis.
This page is about
- how physical hacking attacks with mobile (flying/floating) microbots could be attempted and
- how one could defend against that.
Hardening against disassemblability from the surface
- adding physical lock mechanisms needing a fitting key - See related page: Microcomponent tagging
To slow down attacks
- reducing the number of places where disassembly can begin
- add timers for unlocking
See: Self limitation for safety
Relationship to the (outdated) molecular assembler concept
There are some similar challenges:
- Need for mobility
- More resilience against radiation due to no space for shielding against UV light
So there is motivation for deliberately violating some of the safety sides of the reproduction hexagon.
About the more or less criminal motivations
Robbery for the purpose of attaining raw resources (chemical elements) seems unlikely. Rare elements will likely not be needed in most products since catalysis can use piezochemistry instead or just needs only minute amounts of catalyzing elements.
A more plausible motivation may be the desire to gain access and reverse engineer closed source products. The goal in most cases will likely be taking control rather than total disassembly and reassembly. Large scale recomposing would likely be difficult/slow/impossible anyway, given only a small number of attacking microbots without self-replicative capabilities (because ultra-compact self-replication has three problems - See molecular assembler).
Another motivation: Direct physical attack of war machinery.
Even bad pranks may be a motivation.
Getting furniture to physically assault people in their homes is not a nice thing to look forward too.
All the more reason for self limitation for safety.
hat is making furniture fundamentally incapable of doing that by not giving their constituents that capability.
This kind of thing could even whit software hacking though.
The golden worry free times
The time-span between
- the first advanced products of gem-gum technology and
- the emergence of the first malicious microbots for direct physical hacking attacks.
